New Year’s Day

First picture of the New Year

0 miles

We’re trapped in the tarp again, on New Year’s this time. We’re bored. Ender’s Game is the book that succeeded Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—some easy reading science fiction to take the place of hardcore natural realism—but I don’t know if we should finish it today, because then we’ll be all done and that will make me sad and we won’t have a book left to read. I’m thinking over my resolutions and wondering if I should have shared them because then they won’t come true.

I’m also wondering if anyone is reading or commenting on my blog, on the things that I’m writing and the ideas I’m exploring. I’ve been writing them differently than I did on the Appalachian Trail, exploring my larger goals and larger concepts, rather than focusing on the day-to-day minutia of how many miles I’ve hiked or how much pain I’m in. It makes my hiking journal less interesting to some, I’m sure, especially those looking for specific details about the Pinhoti Trail so they can hike it in the future. But more interesting to others, I hope, more interesting to those unconcerned with mileage but interested in the feeling of long-distance hiking.

My right shoulder is in pain, and I do find myself thinking about little details like how we carried too much food out of town or when we’re going to finish if we don’t stop doing more than a zero day at a time. I feel like it’s more valuable to find something interesting to focus on and write about it than it is to obsess on the little details. Especially by the end of the AT all I could think and write about was how many miles I was doing a day. Today I’m frustrated by not hiking, by being a day further behind, but I want to think about other things, like books and music and art.

There was an eighty-percent chance of thunderstorms today. I should have known. Maybe it’ll still clear and enable us to hike, but I doubt it. It feels like an all-day rain.